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Jan 2, 2015

Friday, January 2, 2015, John Lampkin

I ended the year with John Lampkin, and I begin with another from the clecho king. This time the theme seems simple, the second word, or second part of a known word or phrase is a synonym for boss. The clecho part is that each are clued with "TOP" meaning the best or the boss. The grid is filled with sparkly stuff like AT FAULT, AURORAS, BAD CALL, DOLLS UP, HAYSEED, I’M TOAST, SPARROW, SPEEDOS, TEARFUL, COPY DESK and SUSPENSE.

17A. Top horticulturist? : BUSHMASTER. This SNAKE breaks into parts for the theme. It is part of the viper family.

36A. Top dairyman? : CREAM CHEESE. Like wheel below, this one needs a "Big" before it to project the same meaning as the rest of the theme.

47A. Top entomologist? : FLYWHEEL. You had to know John would get something buggy into the grid. A flywheel is a rotating mechanical device that is used to store rotational energy. Flywheels have a significant moment of inertia and thus resist changes in rotational speed. The amount of energy stored in a flywheel is proportional to the square of its rotational speed. Energy is transferred to a flywheel by applying torque to it, thereby increasing its rotational speed, and hence its stored energy. Conversely, a flywheel releases stored energy by applying torque to a mechanical load, thereby decreasing the flywheel's rotational speed. per wiki.

Picture and captions from John Lampkin:

I don't pretend to be a FLY WHEEL myself, but I do enjoy photographing
them! This bee-mimic Robber Fly captured a beetle and landed on my friend Doug's pant leg. The other members of our group who were 20 feet away were wondering why I was photographing Doug's crotch. Anything for a shot.

57A. Top cinematographer? : FILM LEADER. The TERM is also about movies but I did not know it.

Across:

1. Like Sherlock's game : AFOOT. An A word that is really used, and for a detective story lover, this was a great way to start.

6. Jerk : BOOB. This meaning for the word boob has long been supplanted by the slang word for female breast, which makes JL's intersecting 6D. Museum work : BUST so amusing. The king of the cross-reference strikes again. I found the clue/fill slowed me down big time.

10. Medical ending : OSIS. For some reason HALITOSIS popped into my head, even though HYPNOSIS, OSMOSIS and TUBERCULOSIS are clearly more common.

14. Sierra Nevada tourist attraction : TAHOE. A truly awesome place to visit with the mountains, the lake and the casinos.

15. Bruin's home : UCLA. This took much longer than it should have, perhaps a product of growing up near Boston, though my first answer was CAVE.

16. Leave in a bad way : DUMP. Ah the heartbreak of it all. Any great stories of broken romances? 35D. Like some goodbyes : TEARFUL.

19. East in Ecuador : ESTE. How odd that of all the Spanish speaking countries, JL picked Ecuador. We have clients involved in a big project there.

20. Puncture opening? : ACUpuncture.

21. Lay : PUT. Not sure, Lay Down?

22. Main signal : SOS. In this case the bounding main of the open seas.

24. "I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity" writer : POE. An interesting and tragic figure. You can read more HERE.

25. Less inclined to ramble : TERSER.

29. Get a leg up ... and down : STEP.

30. Pearl Buck heroine : OLAN. How lucky can I get, we just had this.

32. Playground retort : CAN SO. Can not.

33. Comparable to a beet : AS RED.

35. Private meetings : TRYSTS. Well usually private and naughty.

38. Emulates a fan : ADORES.

40. Lessen : ABATE.

41. Go __ : TO POT. Or Colorado?

42. Rosa's rosa, e.g. : FLOR. Is this flower in both Spanish and Italian?

43. Cut, in a way : ETCH.

49. Homburg kin : FEDORA. Hats off to John, who actually wears hats for getting this fill in the grid.

1. Chances for a walk in the park? : AT BATS. Some baseball misdirection as the park is the ball park. It is safe to say John likes to be misleading, as in another baseball clue 27D. Mistake at home, perhaps : BAD CALL.

2. Tap : FAUCET. So simple but I started out struggling in the NW corner.

3. "And I'm Cleopatra" : OH SURE. followed by...

4. Awed response : OOH. Now if the next clue were Buckeye state, we would have quite a progression. We also have 59D. Spa sound : AHH.

5. Home of Arizona State : TEMPE. I have quite a few cousins who got degrees there.

Got the theme with CREAM CHEESE. Didn't mean the others were easy to fill!

Went swimming today, after finally declaring the long illness essentially over. Then, after brunch, slept for a few hours until the phone rang. Then slept several more hours! So here I am. And maybe someone will look at my effort here!

Got ELL with all perps. Gosh. How tired was I?

OLESON took a while. Had SECRET in and took it out and eventually put it in again.

I can usually suss John's innuendo, but managed to go wrong on this one. My city VIP was first a MGR, and my editor was at the CITY desk. "Good Lord!" was OY VEY -- that really bollixed up Florida. But everything worked out in the end. Fun stuff! Thanks, JL.

Lampkin and Lemon, what a great combination. Very witty and informative as usual, Lemon. John, I loved your misdirection and the theme. I caught on to the theme early with BUSHMASTER.At first, I was thinking this was Tuesday and was shocked to find so little low hanging fruit. When I remembered it was Friday and a Lampkin puzzle, I switched mental gears and found this a tad easier than most Fridays.When I was young a jerk was called a BOOB. Hope you had a wonderful anniversary yesterday, Marti and Allan.

I got the theme right away with BUSHMASTER and BONEHEAD, but then things got a little weird. CHEESE doesn't mean anything to me without "big", so I thought CREAM was being used in the sense of "Cream of the crop". And then I went completely off the rails and entered BIG WHEEL instead of FLY WHEEL (not realizing that the punny part was supposed to always be the second word, not understanding that WHEEL referred to anything by itself and not actually reading the clue...)

GO TO POT didn't mean anything to me (I only know GO TO SEED), so it took awhile to dig myself out of the mess I created for myself in the SW, but I eventually figured it out on my own.

In the SE, I needed to get rid of EDIT for ETCH and I WISH for I HOPE before I could make much progress there. I'm a huge Fedora fan, but never heard of a homburg, so I needed a lot of perp help until I could make a guess. And CREEPO? Sure, why not...

This puzzle pulled lots of things out of the woodwork. On the first pass I had AFOOT, UCLA, ESTE, and EIEIO. I was thinking I'M TOAST but finishied it. Great misdirecting clues. The top solved slowly and after getting BUSHMASTER the theme was easy. The SE was the last to fall as I originally had AAH for AHH (it was OOH, not OHH wasn't it), EDIT for ETCH, and BUT for YET.

The unknowns solved by perps were FLOR, OLESON, & OMAR.

For 61A I kept thinking Frau Blucher with the horse noise for Fraulein INGA, which was a perp.

After two weeks of no puzzling, I picked away at yesterday's on and off all day and still didn't finish. Today was a little better, but still had to come here to fill in the the top half completely. Next time I travel, I need to get back at the beginning of a week to allow myself to ease into the easier ones after the hiatus.

Needless to say, our trip was wonderful, with lots of hands on bonding with Lea, as she enjoyed her second Christmas--the first she really could understand. Her dad told us that the morning of our departure she went through the apartment saying "Oma, Opa, no?", which made us feel really bad, but she didn't understand the night before, when we told her we'd be going the next morning. Looking forward to our Skype session this weekend.

31d: Officially LEM was not what the Apollo 11 lander was officially called in 1969. The name "lunar excursion module" (LEM) was used by NASA until 1967. Becausetheir Public Affairs Office thought that "Excursion" had a frivolous connotation, they shortened the name to "lunar module" (LM), which was still pronounced "lem". Ref: Page 267 of "Moonlander," a book written by Thomas J. Kelly the Grumman Aerospace Corp. program manager of the LM.

Whew, what a workout! Getting the theme early helped me look for synonyms for boss (Top) but I still had to work hard to finish this one without cheating.

No one else seemed to have trouble with the SW? For the life of me, I wanted CITYDESK and I could not get it out of my pea-sized brain. I knew ADIRES probably wasn't right but ADORES just seemed anathema to me. COPYDESK finally emerged... not sure how, and that fixed things.

Interesting construction and selection of fill: kind of a tough Saturday-like effort but with themes: sex and baseball? SECRET, TRYSTS, BOOB, BUST, ATBATS, with a BADCALL... just a bit of misdirection here and there. Learning points: OMAR, INGA, OLAN, OLESON.

Thanks, John Lampkin, and thanks, Lemonade.

Lots of waxing poetic today but personally I wish I had eaten breakfast BEFORE looking at the Brazilian Wax link.

WEES. Most of the same misdirections occurred to me at 5:00 this morning and as I zipped along in the center, east and south thought, laughingly, JL didn't stump me. Ha! The NW totally stopped me in my tracks. Sigh. A walk in the park was a baseball reference. And I refused to give up GROW MASTER, even knowing it should be a play on words.

After two hours of further sleep and some erasing, BUSH MASTER emerged then BATS, AFOOT, etc. So I limped to home base (!) scarred, but not beaten.

I loved the lap sitters, FELINE and TOY DOG. Of course, TEMPE, ESTE, FLOR and AURORA (my middle name) were givens. With a middle name meaning dawn, you'd think I would enjoy mornings. I don't.

A real Friday toughie for me. I got the WEST readily enough but had a terrible time getting a toehold in the ESTE. Got the theme, too, but that didn't help much and in the end finished only with a lot of cheating. I realized afterwards that I had actually considered a lot of answers that turned out to be right but wasn't confident enough to try them. I think I need to crank up my courage a little.

Thanks Lemonade for the kind words in the wrap. I'm sure it's a relief to all of us that you are still married after two weeks and your bride still lets you blog. Wahoo!Owen @5:39 Brazilian waxes indeed! And you came up with that at the crack of Dawn! Thank you all for your comments-- we do have fun here. Best to all for a healthy and happy.

Owen, you "cracked me up" with your last limerick - was a bit surprised to see the link, but unlike Rainman I had already eaten! And while we're on the topic, would you call an esthtititian who applies wax to her OWN genitals a BUSHMASTER-bater??!

John and LEM (with the noticeable SO to the re-capper), good job! I again had to cheat (OLESON) so I am batting .000 for solves - or positively 1.000 for lookups!

Once I got OLESON the rest of the puzzle fell into place; a couple of ink blots when I had CITY DESK for 36d and EDIT for 43a

The game with JL was AFOOT from the 1st STEP. The NW FELL & I thought OUI, I areSO (err @32a) NEAR.

Then my BONEHEAD self got bogged in the LUSH fill NEAR the SE. deTest never became HATRED. OH, ??t. Thank GOD for the expo.

From there my puzzle when TO POT, YET I kept trying. Like Kazie, I've not played until yesterday and it shows.

Thanks to LEM for the answers and JL for putting my brain on notice. I HOPE I can get it into gear to CREAM Monday's puzzle.

I watched Little House and knew OLESON. Here's the summary of the program from WKRP S3E3:

Lucille: We only allow the children to watch wholesome, family entertainment.TV Hostess: Like what?Lucille: Uh. Well, The Little House on the Prairie. Now that's a fine, wholesome show. It's about blind children out west, and every week they have a fire, or someone gets an incurable disease. We enjoy it very much.

i laughed at so many things! when i got to the "one might be in your lap" i looked down to my little Beulah and tried to type CHIHUAHUA but it didn't fit! and then later to find my FELINE sitting behind my head...and oh how i wish the guys at the YMCA pool all looked like that in their SPEEDOS. the two baseball references made me wish for spring.

thanks for the giggles, John. so entertaining!! and great write up (and drool-inducing pictures of course)Lemon!

Rosa's rosa is also Pink in Spanish and Italian. Flower is fiore in Italian. LGA was named for Fiorello Laguardia. Little flower. Yes it's after 8 pm. No it didnt take me all day I start the puzzle when I get home to unwind with a glass of Rosa's vino

This was one of those puzzles where I got going in the wrong direction and never could find my way back.

But that's ok. I'm still basking over the unblemished "Smiley Face" offering from yesterday. Never did get around to posting my victory dance. A personal victory like that is equal to a dozen unsolved Fridays (at least in my world) :-)

Good Saturday morning, folks. Thank you, John Lampkin, for a fine puzzle. Thank you, Lemonade, for a fine review.

Well, I struggled with the NW corner off and on for hours last night. No cigar. So, this morning I got the paper and looked up the solution. I had SKIP instead of STEP and WOW instead of OOH. If I could have straightened those out I am sure I could have gotten AFOOT, BUSH, TERSER, ATBATS, FAUCET, and OH SURE. Oh well, maybe today will be better.

Liked the theme.

The whole puzzle was very good. Lots of off the wall answers which is fine for a Friday. Got everything except the NW corner.

With that, I will start on today's puzzle.

See you later, I hope. Funeral this afternoon for a 91 year old Mason.